Thank you!Follow

With all due respect to Railus and Cyliena, who brought us so much energy and passion, I must say that when ZAM started to embrace a new direction and let go those who brought us EQ1 content, most of the community (as well as myself) wondered why we should continue to patronize this site with our dollars. There were many who abandoned this site with anguish. I myself cancelled my account.

But lo and behold, my wife (secretly behind my back) reactivated our account due to our renewed interest with the latest wave of progression servers and wanted access to the wealth on information here. Bah (humbug) i thought. Wasted money.

But what I found was a passion from the volunteers that took up the slack - Snailish, Aaiken, FourleggedFiend, and many others that brought so much vibrancy back to this community. To you - I salute you. To those that came before you, I salute you too.

Thank you for keeping this site alive!

Wow, thank you!

I'm humbled by your sentiments guys and I appreciate your understanding and support of our efforts.

None of us wanted to see this site fall by the wayside, there's too much value to the wealth of information this site provides to the EverQuest user base. And as the game is, it's lasting success can be tied into the benefit this site provides. Allakhazam's, or Zam as it eventually became known, was a useful resource to me countless times as I'm sure it has been to so many others. It just didn't feel right to see the site stagnate, so I was grateful that Cyliena had the foresight to ask for volunteers to help after the move.

We'll continue to provide news and updates as long as we can because we love the game as much as you guys do. But hearing this feedback lets us know that it's still appreciated and it makes it all worthwhile.

Thanks again for your comments, they are deeply appreciated.

- Aaik

First, thank you for the thank you.





I'm unhappy of the trail of former staff across the entire site. I can do nothing about that.

My fear was that the EQ database would be frozen (user posts under old stuff would still keep it useful, but harder to use eventually) and the general forum would go dead like many of the other game forums here. Worse would be if it just got shut down with no notice. I do suggest that big content contributors of writeups (Sippin and Fayman for example) post their stuff somewhere else like Fanra's as well, just in case (if they weren't already doing that).

I volunteer for the community here at Zam, not Zam corporate (I wouldn't know them if they messaged me). At any point they could remove all the volunteer admn access. My hope is that by us continuing to update what we can, and keeping the conversations going they see enough traffic for their ad revenue + the truly faithful that continue to subscribe to premium so that they leave the servers up and running this site in their empire of sites. The Broken Mirror has shown us that there are things we don't have access to do, but we can --with the help of our users, keep the site useful.

Server space isn't the cost that it once was, and the gutted staff means this particular part of the empire isn't drawing much dollars out* of the business at all (some item collector stuff has been done which is huge, the ask for "The Broken Mirror" tab under the wiki tab has been in limbo for weeks which is a bit of a drag but not the end of the world) so I am hoping we get left alone (if we can't have paid support doing the job better like Railus, Fleven and Cyliena did in recent times) for years to come.


*I would predict they are making money due to the premium accounts, but if that keeps Allakhazam's legacy rolling, so be it.

My hat is also off to Snailish and others who do this incredible amount of work---and for free. I've been very busy with year-end work so haven't had much time even to play let alone write up my "adventures" here. But I have to admit it bothers me to see the allakhazam admin and powers-that-be effectively abandon the site while enjoying the benefit of the free labor of others. Heck, I'd love to find a way to get people to contribute free work to my own business---except I do have principles. Yes, EQ is a hobby and historically gamers put a lot of unpaid time and effort into designing sites and writing up valuable game info in forums, bulletin boards and other websites maintained by others, sometimes even by for-profit businesses. But it's unusual, I think, when a for-profit business which had paid employees maintaining a site transition this way to depending entirely on volunteer workers WHILE STILL CHARGING CUSTOMERS FOR "PREMIUM" SERVICES. I'd feel a lot better if they did what some other EQ sites do: solicit VOLUNTARY donations from customers, perhaps while rewarding them with some kind of "perk" (something innocuous like a title or their forum name in colorful boldface) rather than restrict their access to site content unless they pay money.

That's just my 2cp.

TBH, if I have to start posting "my stuff" on other forums just to protect against it getting lost in case Allakhazam-EQ goes off-line, I'd be inclined to JUST post it "elsewhere". Fortunately I do keep local copies of everything I post here, cuz my mama didn't raise no fool!

Honestly, I think it was a close call with TBM. I found myself going more and more to EQResources for their useful write-ups about this new xpac. The combined efforts of Snailish and the other volunteer admins, as well as the incredible amount of detailed original material that Fayman (hat's off to you too, man) posted saved the day for allakhazam-EQ, methinks.



Edited, Jan 17th 2016 8:51pm by Sippin

Name sez it all, eh?

Yes lol !




Edited, Jan 19th 2016 9:46pm by hexeez